


Music When The Lights Go Out

by Aramley



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: Break Up, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-17 22:30:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first surprising thing about the break-up, when it happens, is how unsurprising it actually is</p>
            </blockquote>





	Music When The Lights Go Out

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted as part of Netcord on lj.
> 
> Title from the song of the same name by The Libertines.

The first surprising thing about the break-up, when it happens, is how unsurprising it actually is. Novak doesn't realise until it's happening that he's been waiting for it, but when he finds himself there, standing on one side of a Madrid hotel room while Rafa sits on the couch and studiously avoids looking at him, he knows that it's been coming for months.

“I don’t want to do this no more,” Rafa says, looking at his hands. He's picking at the skin around a cuticle; pick, pick, pick, a habit which Novak suddenly finds unbearably irritating. Jesus Christ, he wants to say, will you stop. If you want to ignore me, find a better way to do it. Rafa's shoulders are sloped and tired and Novak feels exhausted too, a wash of emptiness left behind after the post-victory euphoria has drained away.  
So instead, he says, “Yeah, okay.”

Rafa glances up then, with a complicated expression that Novak doesn't want to flatter himself is surprise, or disappointment. "Yeah?"

"I - yeah," Novak says. "I don't want it to be like this any more, either. So is easier if we just, you know. Stop."

Rafa nods slowly. The hotel room is big but the distance between them feels greater than it really is, a couple of steps that might as well be a couple of miles, the space from the chair Novak's sitting on to the sofa where Rafa is like the distance between one continent to the next. Some things are hard and worth it and some are just hard, and it sucks that you can't always tell one from the other.

"I'm sorry," Rafa says. Novak manages to life the corner of his mouth in a smile, something in him aching like a pulled muscle.

"It's okay," he says. Rafa's looking at him in a way that's almost suspicious, and he wonders if Rafa expected Novak to make this harder than it's been. The thing is, it's hard to keep on fighting when you finally look up and realise that the lights are down, the crowds have gone home, and the other guy left the court a long time ago.

-

The second surprising thing about the break-up is how much sex they keep having in spite of it. It's not as much sex as they were having _pre_ -breakup, but Novak still feels like having any kind of sex at all with someone who recently told you that they didn't want to see you anymore is pretty noteworthy.

"We have to stop meeting like this," Novak says, whispered and laughing, into Rafa's shoulder - a laugh that dies in a gasp at a sharp bite administered to his collarbone, Rafa's hips moving in a rough, staccato rhythm against his. He thrusts back, one arm around Rafa's neck and his other hand gripping a hip hard enough that it feels like he could bruise, although he knows from experience that Rafa's not so easily marked.

Sometimes it's pretty hard to tell that they're broken up at all. It's not as though they'd ever lived together, or shared much more than hotel beds and whatever time they could spare, and so far the major differences seem to be that Rafa doesn't answer his texts any more and that he's won back all his own high scores at Fifa. There are no boxes of each other's belongings to return, no shared spaces to awkwardly negotiate - except for the tennis court, which has never been anything but a battleground.

"Shh," Rafa hisses, when Novak makes a high involuntary noise in the back of his throat, and Novak shuts his eyes and bites down into the fabric of Rafa's t-shirt to keep himself quiet - it would be beyond ironic to get caught now, when they're not even together. Slow nights in hotel rooms behind locked doors have turned into frantic encounters fuelled by post-match adrenaline, and it's starting to look an awful lot like a vicious cycle: they keep playing, and Novak keeps winning, and Rafa keeps dragging him into closets and bathroom stalls and sticking his hand down Novak's pants - which wouldn't be a cause for complaint, except that he's starting to worry that neither of them really know any more where a tennis court ends.

When he comes it feels dragged out of him, the boneless feeling afterwards less satisfaction than sheer exhaustion. In the few moments of stillness before they break apart, Novak cards Rafa's damp hair back from his flushed face and kisses him, murmurs against his mouth, "Seriously, we have to stop meeting like this."

-

And then, abruptly, they stop meeting like that.

-

It's after the US Open when Rafa calls at last, and Novak stares at the number on the screen of his phone for a too-long moment before he answers.

"Sorry for the loss," Rafa says. It's months since Novak's seen him and longer than that, much longer, since Rafa last voluntarily called him for something not business related. He sounds far away and quieter than usual, maybe it's a bad line or maybe Novak's reading something into it that isn't there, that wouldn't be a first.

"Thanks," he says. Without quite knowing why, he gets up and goes into the bedroom, nudging the door shut although there's no-one around to overhear and nothing, surely, to overhear. "So, how is the knee?"

Rafa huffs out a breath. "Hurts," he says, and gives Novak a brief run-down of the treatment he's getting, how he hopes to be back maybe for Paris or London at the end of the year, if everything goes well. They talk about the tour, and Novak tells him that he's missed and manages to avoid saying, _I miss you_ , but maybe Rafa hears it anyway.

"Novak," Rafa says. "You think maybe, if things are different -?" and he trails off, but the question is clear.

Novak sighs and sits down on the edge of the bed, thinking, well sure, but how different would they have to be? If I kept losing and you never started; if my knees hurt me every day and you knew the sound of air raid sirens; if we were both better losers, and we both liked winning less.

But none of these things are true, and nobody ever won a game of _what if?_ , so Novak just clears his throat and says, "Well, it is what it is, you know?"

From the other end of the phone there's a short silence, a sharp sound that might be a seagull somewhere in the background. Rafa must be on the beach, and Novak imagines him barefoot in swimming trunks, looking out to the sea and maybe finally far away enough for long enough that things start to look different with the change of perspective.

"You think when I come back, you and I can maybe - " Rafa says, and trails off again.

"I don't know," he says, truthfully. The old ache flares again, briefly and muted, like an injury that's healed over. He thinks he could explain it like that to Rafa and he'd understand – that it's the kind of pain you could play through every day if you had to, but mostly you just want it to go away. Some things are hard and worth it, and some are just hard. But without trying, you might never know which is which.


End file.
